For the Sake of Argument

This morning I found myself struggling with what to write. It’s been quiet now that climbing season has wound down, and classes have started up again. I keep a workbook of idle musings, so I decided to review it and hit upon a realization. I have for the most part given up on trying to change people’s minds. Before I get too far into that I think a little context is in order.

A couple years back I listened to a sermon where the pastor discussed how most people don’t argue with the intent to arrive at a mutual understanding, but to “win”. Debates are simply just another competition where we vie to bludgeon our opponent with the irrefutability of our logic or lived experience. The problem with this approach, as the pastor point out, is that if both parties have this outlook, then “winning” paradoxically becomes impossible. Both parties intuitively understand that if they don’t concede, the other side can’t win. Given the futility of changing someone else’s mind, the pastor advocated for trying to establish common ground to reach a mutual understanding on topics.

At the time I was studying information theory. One of the more surprising lessons in the textbook that I had concerned the game of “20 questions”. The textbook asserted that a game of twenty questions, perfectly played, could cover over a million different possibilities. The argument was simple: if you can halve the number of possibilities with a yes or no question each time then the number of possibilities you could rule out in a complete game was two to the 20th power, or 1,048,576. The sermon unlocked an epiphany for me. Most people discuss current events as a means to political discourse. By doing so we show others that we’re informed and care about the world around us. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t exactly lend itself to achieving mutual understanding. If someone brings up how they hope a particular referendum will pass, whereas you prefer that it didn’t, arguing for or against the merits of that referendum conceal the the 19 other questions that led to that conclusion. The true crux of the issue could be 7 premises back. That would constitute a separation of 2^7, or 128, different positions along the spectrum between you and them. The deeper the premise, the more fundamental it is to an individual’s worldview. Trying to achieve mutual understanding across such a gulf quickly becomes impossible.

For a while I tried to use this insight to achieve a shared understanding on the underlying issue. Probably the best cleavage point between American conservatives and American liberals is their stance on the premise “There is nothing the private sector can’t do better than the public sector.” Many of those on the right (and left) take their assumption on this premise for granted, and as a result often talk past one another. I thought that the best way to come to agreement would be to go back even further and analyze the premises that make up this conclusion. Etymologically this reveals several sub-questions and sub-premises:

• What is a government? (A monopoly of violence within a defined geographic area)
• What is private enterprise? (An organization outside of the state)
• What is considered “good”? (deontology vs. consequentialism)?
• Has it always been that private is better than public? What changed? When? Why?

I toyed with this approach for about six months. I used it with friends, family, and even strangers. What I found was that most people found it, at best, pedantic. At worst it was badgering, tangential, and navel gazing. Most people don’t like to deeply contemplate their premises. Contrary to Socrates quote that “an unexamined life isn’t worth living,” most people get more uncomfortable the deeper into the “20 questions” that you delve. Socrates’ forced ingestion of hemlock by those that he questioned being a prime example.

What my experiment made me realize is that trying to win isn’t the only reason that people argue. It’s also a kind of internalized, organic IFF, which is a military acronym for “Identification Friend or Foe.” People discuss current events to differentiate ingroups from outgroups. Which is also why a fair number of people shy away from discussing politics at all. The stress of being subjected to that organic IFF process isn’t any different for them than an F16 fighter jet making a final determination on whether to engage a target it’s placed its reticle on.

So I’ve given up on changing people’s minds or even trying to debug exactly where in the sequence of premises they answered “true” and I answered “false”. I’ll still argue with people for the fun of it just like I used to box and grapple when I was younger. But I no longer do it to make them think the way I do or to win the argument. Instead, argument, like wresting was for me before it, has become a kind of proprioception. A means to unconsciously sense the strengths and weaknesses of my own preconceptions, rather than a means of affecting those around me. I would be lying if I said that competitiveness didn’t occasionally get the better of me. But in the long-term I think this is approach is about the healthiest I could hope for.

Photo by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash